I’ve tried playing with graphviz and dot for some system architecture diagrams - mostly because it integrates well into our internal MediaWiki site and, it’s … ok I guess.
I’ve found it pretty easy to rapidly throw together some reasonable diagrams with relatively little effort but where it really seems to fall down is with the layouts themselves. I’ve found that just so hard to get things to lay out how I want them to and the syntax for this seems particularly arcane to master. I usually just give up after a while and end up with a layout I hate but that at least conveys the information I want to convey.
I’m probably making things hard upon myself because I manually crank out the markup by hand and brute force slog through it until it looks ok. Reading through this thread made me realize that I could potentially be using PlantUML or something similar to make this less awful.
I’ve found it pretty easy to rapidly throw together some reasonable diagrams with relatively little effort but where it really seems to fall down is with the layouts themselves. I’ve found that just so hard to get things to lay out how I want them to and the syntax for this seems particularly arcane to master. I usually just give up after a while and end up with a layout I hate but that at least conveys the information I want to convey.
I’m probably making things hard upon myself because I manually crank out the markup by hand and brute force slog through it until it looks ok. Reading through this thread made me realize that I could potentially be using PlantUML or something similar to make this less awful.